Dino Run 2 March Development Report (Patreon)

Okay!  The dust has settled from the Kickstarter campaign, we had a small break to recover right after, and much progress was made in March but most of it wasn't anything you can actually see, so let's review what was done.... get comfy, this is a long one :)

Almost all of the games we have made have been small or medium in scope. The original Dino Run was probably the largest project we have done, and updating the game these days is a real pain because of the way it was coded 10 years ago.  

Just look at that mess.

This reflects what is commonly known as technical debt, defined as "the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer".

I can't stress enough how important understanding this concept is.  When you make a game of any size, you have to make big decisions at the very beginning about how the game's systems will be organized and architected.  There are often dozens of ways to approach any given challenge...  some of them will get you visible results right away and some won't.  We could take the easy route and just start slapping things together, making cool looking stuff right away and getting everyone very excited about it. However...

This is a very bad way to approach a game of large scope.

Because here is what happens: every shortcut we take at the beginning to satisfy our need to see cool stuff right away, we pay for dearly sometime down the road when we have to re-write it all. That's what technical debt is.

Dino Run 2 is a BIG game.  It has complex systems that govern how terrain is created, how dinos move realistically over this terrain, how the weather works, how the doom wall behaves and churns up the landscape, how the npc dinos control themselves around you and look alive, how the hundreds of subtle little details that give it the Dino Run Feels all work together in harmony, and most importantly how people from opposite ends of the earth can play in realtime together, on the exact same level, and see what the other players are seeing. None of this can be taken lightly.

We are also on a very tight budget.  Every minute and dollar must be spent in the most efficient and effective way, else we risk running out of money, and no one likes that prospect.  So, for Dino Run 2 above any other game we have made, we have to do it RIGHT, from the very beginning, and keep doing it right until the very end.

And what is RIGHT?  Well, that means carefully, with a lot of thought put into each action we take, every day. We need to carefully consider every element of the game and how it will work with everything else.  We need to develop a deep understanding of our engine (Unity) and the tools we will be using and creating to put the game together.

In February you saw us doing a lot of little experiments with physics and rendering.  If you missed them, they are at dinorun2.com.

In March, we took a break from the experiments and started some serious research. We watched many, many talks from the Unite archive videos.  In this way we are "learning from the masters" and making sure we don't make the same mistakes that others have made, or waste time figuring things out that have already been figured out. Notable topics are editor scripting (we need a way to create levels and define the rules of the game, in a way that players can understand and modify themselves!), art workflows (what's the most efficient way to get terrain chunks and dino art into the game / how do we reduce the artist's "busywork"),

We should never have to make a file like this again...

Also don't forget about platform differences (how do we make sure the game works the same on all platforms, including mobile and console), networking (how do players interact with each other in realtime and with minimal lag), procedural generation (how do we combine terrain chunks and grow plants & grass on them and make it look beautiful and fun to run over)...

The list goes on and on, but you get the idea.  We know how to make games, but we need a firmer grasp on how to make this game. Every project has its own challenges and new things to learn.  If we just dive right in with no plan, we are almost guaranteed to fail later on, and that's not an option, is it?  There are 1564 people so far that have put their money and trust in us to not fail.  So right now we are in learn how not to fail mode, which is not exciting to watch, but it's super necessary.

The other thing we did in March was planning for the Stegoball minigame. Stegoball is becoming a very important milestone for us, as it's a proof-of-concept for terrain building and basic physics.  It's also something people will be able to play much sooner than Dino Run 2, but it needs to have all the visual awesomeness that Dino Run 2 is supposed to have.

Now that research-heavy March is coming to a close, we look towards tool-implementing and Stegoball-prototyping April.  And by the end of May we expect to have a playable alpha of the minigame, complete with procedurally generated terrains and rolling physics and all the basic systems of the game intact, but by no means polished or  complete.

We'll deliver things to you as they are ready... we can't wait to show you what's in store :)

Thanks again for the support and patience.

-Miles @ Pixeljam